Forty percent

That's how much of the U.S. Army's equipment has been destroyed or disabled over the past five years.

Bush's "War Czar" says that a draft should be considered to solve the Army's manpower issues. But what are we going to equip the new draftees with? Rubber bands and water pistols? And I'm not even going to talk about the fact that it will take at least a year to get the first draftee divisions into the field, unless the first people we draft are former soldiers who already have the management skills to manage a division...

Madness. Sheer madness. And the morons talk about staying in Iraq for another ten years? Crap, in another three years our guys are going to be shooting AK-47's and RPG' just like the bad guys -- and dying at the same rate. Either that, or we're going to have to contract with the Chinese for more equipment for our troops, because the hollowed-out remnants of our nation's manufacturing sector certainly doesn't have the capacity to keep up with how fast the equipment is being destroyed. What was once the greatest nation on the planet can't even manufacture tanks anymore... we're operating on stored-up remnants of the Cold War arsenal, and those remnants are running out fast.

-- Badtux the Logistics Penguin